Including specific plant foods in one’s diet could make conventional breast cancer chemotherapy much more effective, and even play a role in prevention, say cancer researchers. Published last month, tests done on mice showed that compounds in two everyday food groups could turn almost untreatable breast cancers into ones more susceptible to chemotherapy. Scientists at the University of Alabama gave breast cancer-prone mice a special diet consisting of extracts of green tea and cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, sprouts, cabbage etc) and discovered something truly remarkable: the most “aggressive” cancer types, the hormone negative ones, were changed into the more benign hormone positive types. How was this almost magical transformation achieved ? Through so-called epigenetics, the new (and previously heretical) theory that genes are not fixed but can be modified by the environment.

“One way we can use epigenetics as a powerful tool to fight cancer is through compounds found in our everyday diet,” says Alabama team leader Dr. Trygye Tollefsbol . “Vegetables, for example, are filled with these types of compounds. Your mother always told you to eat your vegetables, and science now tells us she was right.”

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Specifically, it’s the sulphoraphanes in vegetables and the polyphenols in green tea which are the magic wands converting hormone negative cancers into hormone positive ones. These cancers are claimed to be relatively easy to treat with simple, less toxic chemotherapeutic drugs such as tamoxifen.

The even better news is that, if the mice data apply to humans, women at high familial risk of hormone negative breast cancer may have powerful dietary tools to negate their malign genetic inheritance.

“The results of this research provide a novel approach to preventing and treating ER-negative breast cancer, which currently takes hundreds of thousands of lives worldwide,” says co-researcher Dr. Yuanyuan Li. “The next step would be to move this to clinical trial, and to eventually be able to provide more effective treatment options for women either predisposed to or afflicted with this deadly disease."